Tokyo Greenhouses in Black and White
Im Treibhaus documents the interior worlds of Tokyo's greenhouses through a series of intensely dark black-and-white photographs. Takeshi Shinoda avoids architectural framing entirely, directing attention instead toward dense foliage, condensation, and the heavy, pressurised atmosphere that defines these spaces. The resulting images sit somewhere between botanical record and psychological study — tropical plants rendered strange by contrast and proximity, familiar forms made difficult to place.
The work follows Station (2022), in which Shinoda turned the same method on Tokyo's train stations — finding in their transitional, functional spaces a quality of suspension and unease. Im Treibhaus applies that same discipline to a subject that resists easy categorisation: not quite nature, not quite architecture, but a controlled environment where the organic has been made to perform. The continuity between the two books is one of approach rather than subject: the same high-contrast printing, the same refusal of documentary distance.
Published by Sokyusha in 2025, the book is a hardcover measuring 261 × 216 mm across 58 pages, containing 54 images. The edition is limited to 200 copies.
Im Treibhaus is part of the Photography & Photobooks catalogue at Lokator100, where it sits alongside other works in Japanese fine art and urban photography. It will be of interest to collectors of photobooks, readers drawn to Japanese photography, and those attentive to the intersection of urban space and natural form.
About Takeshi Shinoda
Takeshi Shinoda is a Japanese fine art photographer whose practice centres on urban environments and the psychological charge they carry. Working in high-contrast black-and-white, he approaches his subjects — stations, greenhouses, the infrastructural and the incidental — with a consistency of method that makes each series legible as part of a sustained body of work.
His photobook Station (2022) documented Tokyo's train stations through the same atmospheric, close-reading approach that defines Im Treibhaus. Both books were published by Sokyusha.
